Life line on your palm: what it means and what it doesn't

The life line is the curved crease round the base of your thumb, and palmists read it for energy: how much you have, where it goes and how much room you give it. A wide arc is read as appetite and vitality, a close one as care with your energy. A short line doesn't mean a short life, and a gap doesn't mean something is about to go wrong.

The old reading of the line as a clock is the part that has been checked, and it hasn't held up. Below is a tool to measure yours, what palmists read in a short or broken line, all three studies, and where the idea came from in the first place.

Where the life line is, and how to measure yours

Look at the ball of your thumb. The crease that curves around it, from the edge of the palm above the thumb towards the wrist, is the line. Cheiro's description from 1916 still does the job: it "runs round the base of the thumb".

What the life line means in palmistry

Palmists read the life line for energy: vitality, staying power and how you spend yourself. Modern pages have dropped the clock. Numerologist.com's guide calls it "the quality and vitality of your life force", and Lucas's paper sums up the current claim as "someone's vitality, health and wellbeing". A wide arc is the form everyone likes: "a well-defined curve or semicircle out into the palm" in the 1916 handbook, and "enormous vitality" in the modern guide. A line that stays close to the thumb belongs to someone "more measured with their energy".

The old books disagree on where it should start, which is part of the fun. Where the line starts high, near the index finger, the 1916 handbook sees someone with "more control over himself", and the books a 1927 survey reports see an ambition "cherished all the subject's life". Williams read the same start as a life "subject to outside and varying influences", said a start close to the thumb made a life "too narrow and contracted", and put the best place "half way between the first finger and thumb". As a question to ask yourself, it's a good one: where does your energy actually come from, and are you giving it enough room?

Short, broken, faint or doubled: what each is read for

A short life line

A short life line is a crease that stops early, or thins into smaller ones until you can't say where it ended. It doesn't mean a short life. The modern reading is "someone who is cautious with their energy or who experiences a significant reinvention". Reading its length as years failed two of the three tests below, and the third couldn't be repeated.

A broken life line

A broken life line is a gap, often with one end sliding past the other, and palmists read it as a change of direction. Breaks "mark reinvention", in the modern guide's words. The Zancigs, palmists quoted in a 1927 survey, say it "may perhaps show a great change of some sort", and the survey's author suggests the subject may have discovered a cheaper brand of cigarettes. Nobody can tell you when something will happen, whatever the chart says, so take it as a way to think about a change you've already lived through.

A faint line

We found no study of how deep the line is. Lighting changes what you see more than anything: try a lamp from one side.

A doubled line

A second fine line inside the first, on the thumb side. Cheiro calls it the Line of Mars and says it is "not found on all hands". He reads it as backup for the main line, a kind thing to find on your hand.

Does the life line show how long you'll live? What three studies found

As far as the authors of the most recent paper could tell, only three published studies have tested the claim. All three measured the line on people who had died and compared it with their age at death, which is the most direct test anyone can run without waiting a lifetime.

The awkward one is Newrick, and it deserves a fair hearing. It's a real paper in a real journal, the authors reported a real association, and a later paper by Mardia confirmed the numbers were statistically significant, according to Lucas. They wrote, "We feel that a powerful new prognostic sign may thus be within grasp." Then the tabloid Weekly World News ran it as "Amazing new medical study reveals: lifeline on your palm really does tell how long you will live". Lucas reports that Newrick told that same paper he remained a disbeliever in palmistry.

Here's how to read the disagreement without any statistics training.

• Two tests found no significant link. Lucas and colleagues copied Newrick's method, and set their sample size so that a correlation like his would have shown up clearly. It didn't. Their largest result would account for about 3% of the difference in age at death.
• Who was measured matters. Newrick's sample was people who had died in hospital and gone to autopsy. Causes of death weren't reported. Lucas's donors died mostly of diseases of older age, and none by accident, which they argue is closer to what Cheiro actually claimed.
• Even Newrick's number couldn't read a hand. Take his result at face value and more than two thirds of the difference between people still has nothing to do with the line. A pattern across 100 bodies doesn't tell you about one living person.

These are small samples, none followed living people forward, and one more study could change the picture. None of this adds up to proof that no connection could ever exist. It does mean that nothing supports looking at your own palm and concluding anything about your years. For the wider evidence on palm reading, see our guide to whether it is real.

How to measure a life line with a piece of string

Lucas spells out the method in one sentence, and you can do it at your kitchen table: "A piece of string was placed along the line, the beginning and the end was marked on the string and then the string was straightened and the distance between the two marks was measured with a ruler." In their sample the line ran from 54 mm to 120 mm. People's lines differ by a factor of two with no help from fate.

Our scan isn't a replacement for string. Near the bottom of the arc a trace can slide onto a parallel crease or stop early, and the scan marks how sure it is of each line. You can correct a trace by hand with the line tracer.

Where the idea of a life line clock came from

The claim most people have heard is Cheiro's. In Palmistry for All he notes that the line lies over a large blood vessel, and he adds: "It is reasonable to assume that it is this intimate connection with the vital organs of the body which enables it to foretell the length of life from natural causes." That reasoning sounds anatomical, and it's a guess. Lucas's plain summary is that "biologically, the line of life is merely another flexion crease on the palm of the hand".

Skepticism is nearly as old. Leo Markun, writing in 1927, had noticed how palmists handled customers who had outlived their lines: "If an octogenarian, falling into senile decay, decides to visit a chiromancer, and the charlatan observes that the line stops short at the age of thirteen, it is clearly necessary to find other indications of old age on the hand."

Why your life line differs between your two hands

Measure both and you'll almost certainly get two numbers. Markun made a joke of this nearly a century ago, pointing out the "special difficulty" for lifespan readers that "the line is seldom of equal length in both hands". Which hand would be the clock? Lucas found no significant difference between right and left on average, which is a statement about groups and leaves your own pair free to disagree. Palmists say the left shows what you were born with and the right what you've made of it. Your head line and fate line will differ between hands too, and books explain those the same way.

If this is really about your health

Sometimes a search like this one isn't idle. If you're worried about your health or someone else's, your palm has nothing to tell you, and a doctor can actually look.

If you came for the fun of it, the rest of the palm's lines are on one map. The scanner traces your own, and the free reading gives you one line in full.